HBO's 'A Killer Story' Revisits Chandler Case True Crime Crusade — SkimNews
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- Dana Chandler was arrested in 2011 on two counts of premeditated first-degree murder for the 2002 Topeka, Kansas killings of ex-husband Mike Sisco and his wife Karen Harkness, and sentenced to consecutive life terms the next year, after a 2009 CBS 48 Hours report revived the case the original prosecutor had declined due to lack of evidence placing her at the scene.
- Eileen and Keen Umbehr, a husband-and-wife true crime team, sold 200 acres of inherited family property to fund Chandler's legal defense after helping persuade the Kansas Supreme Court to overturn her conviction in 2016.
- Keen Umbehr is a former garbageman-turned-muckraker whose reporting on local corruption led to a 7-2 U.S. Supreme Court First Amendment win in 1996 after the county cancelled his garbage contract in retaliation; he later ran unsuccessfully for Kansas governor as a libertarian in 2014.
- After a second trial in 2022 ended in a hung jury — with the Umbehrs' alternate-suspect theory targeting Harkness's son-in-law Jeff Sutton collapsing — Chandler fired her lawyers and was reconvicted in a third trial after only an hour and a half of jury deliberation.
- Pulitzer-winning journalist Joe Sexton (New York Times, ProPublica) joined filmmakers Matthew Galkin and Josh Levine on a six-year investigation, telling the Guardian that local Topeka press coverage at the time of Chandler's arrest was 'in the pocket of prosecutors' and that CBS tipped off local reporters to the arrest.
- The prosecution's circumstantial case rested on Chandler's angry messages about her ex-husband and a credit-card purchase of two spare fuel canisters, despite her living more than 500 miles away in Denver and no forensic evidence linking her to the scene.
- Filmmaker Matthew Galkin said Chandler would likely have been freed had she not represented herself, calling it a 'massively self-destructive' choice — a decision that also ended the Umbehrs' relationship with their former cause after they bet their farm on her exoneration.
Why it matters: The documentary highlights how true-crime media (CBS 48 Hours), politically motivated prosecutors, and eroded local press can compound to convict someone with no physical evidence at the scene — a cautionary pattern for the roughly 3,000 unsolicited tips and appeals-of-last-resort campaigns now common in the post-DNA-exoneration era.
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